


this ocean between us (grows wide and goes deep)

by mystarsandmyocean



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak (Slightly), mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-11 03:57:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2052699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystarsandmyocean/pseuds/mystarsandmyocean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Robert Queen loses himself at sea, he drags his little, lost boy with him.</p>
<p>(All Oliver's ever wanted is to right his father's wrongs)</p>
            </blockquote>





	this ocean between us (grows wide and goes deep)

"Make it better; right my wrongs."

The last words of a dying man; when Robert Queen loses himself at sea, he drags his little, lost boy with him.  

The dead weight of his body -  _their_ bodies - lulls them towards Lian Yu, pressure on the starboard side lolling with the waves.  How can his father expect him to right his wrongs, when he is not nearly the man his father is?  (Strong and certain and dead, so very dead - 

His eyes flicker, again, to his body, before running away.  Running, hiding - that's what he's good at.  He gags, lacing his fingers behind his head, choking on his own spit.)

\---

He finds the notebook at his father's funeral.  

(Do you still call it a funeral when no one knows they're dead?)

He'd dig a grave beside him and lay down in it, but he's tired, so very tired, and Robert Queen deserves a proper grave far more than Oliver.  

Robert Queen, he thinks, fighting back tears, the hunger and thirst, those damn, stupid  _birds_ , deserved to survive.  Not him.

He thinks of the gun in his pocket, the one bullet he thinks is left.  Between him and his father and Sara - vivacious, beautiful Sara - (the captain doesn't cross his mind, not yet), him and his four years of failure can't even make himself okay, let alone an entire city.  

Let alone even survive.  

(He thinks of the gun, but a niggle of want stirs in his stomach.  He waits, and thinks, he'll try.)

\---

When he returns from the island (only partially, he buried pieces of himself, beside his father, Yao Fei, Shado, Sara, Slade, the list never ends), he thinks he understands.  

He will make it better.  He will make it right - do what his father couldn't (Save, and protect, their city).

His mother, as always, breaks his illusions.  First:

"Robert was unfaithful to me repeatedly. It made our marriage difficult, to say the least.  I'm sorry, Oliver, but your father wasn't always the man you thought he was."

No, he wasn't.  But he still thought he  _knew,_ that he understood - 

It doesn't matter, he decides.  He'll still make it better.  Right his wrongs - his father's and his owns.

(He tries to do better, in this order: Laurel, Helena, McKenna, Laurel again - and again and again.)

He narrows focus on his father's wrongs.  His own are too many and too difficult to conquer.

\---

He never knew, he learns.  He never understood.  

(A small, hidden part of him sags in relief.  His own father, a killer, like him.  Another wrong they share - another wrong he can make  _right_.  Another part of him wishes he'd buried that piece of himself with the rest.)

He still fails, though.  He doesn't make anything better or right.  Just dead.

(At least, that small part of him scoffs, he no longer needs to aspire so high.  Oliver and Robert Queen are not so different, after all.

Oliver Queen, though, is alive, and Robert Queen is dead.)

\---

Later: He makes Felicity his secretary, screwing over her, her life, as usual.  He tries to make it better by distracting Isabel from her trail.  

(He made it worse instead.)

He loses his father's company, his legacy, forcing his family into financial ruin.  He tries to save his sister - honor his father's choice - and drags everyone down with him instead.  

(He remembered the waves lapping at his hand, the roil of rot as the heat broke Robert Queen's body to rags and flesh and bone.

Was he still on that raft, Oliver Queen, lost at sea?)

He pushes his mother, his sister, the woman (women) he loves away, for their own good, for secrets, for lies and half-truths and because he is arrogant enough to believe he understands what needs to be done to save them all.   

(He makes it better, in the end - begins to right  _his_ wrongs, not Robert Queen's.  But not because of his father, or the lessons he'd learned from him: it's because he found _another way_.)

\---

The more he knows, the more he _understands_ , the more a thought coils, strong and certain, in his gut.

Robert Queen is not the better man.  A better man would hate his father.  

(Oliver Queen does not hate him.  But - some days, the thought takes hold and  _grows_.)


End file.
